


but i remember you before you became a story

by younglegends



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: Multi, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 13:16:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4350218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/younglegends/pseuds/younglegends
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Once upon a time, there lived a girl who was a duck, or maybe it was the other way around. When the story brought her to life again—</i>
</p>
<p>  <i>But that’s not true, is it? She was always alive. And when the story made her a girl again, she found she had not left behind the wild inside of her. </i></p>
<p>Or: In which Ahiru has been a duck for so long, she has begun to forget what it is to be a girl. And meanwhile, deep in the heart of the forest, there arises a sound.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but i remember you before you became a story

> _No way back then, you remember, we decided,  
>  but forward, deep into a wood..._
> 
> \-- Marie Howe, [_Gretel, from a Sudden Clearing_](http://www.bu.edu/agni/poetry/print/2002/56-howe.m.html)  
> 

 

_Once upon a time, there lived a girl who was a duck, or maybe it was the other way around. When the story brought her to life again—_

_But that’s not true, is it? She was always alive. And when the story made her a girl again, she found she had not left behind the wild inside of her._

 

On the one thousand and twenty-first day of being a duck, Ahiru becomes a girl again.

She takes one stumbling step, two, and then falls into the steady arms waiting for her.

“Oh, Fakir,” she says, eyes filling with tears, “I can’t hear it, anymore.”

“Hear what?” he says. “What is it?” 

But it is so much heavier to be a girl than a duck, and the light is tilting in all around, pressing against her, so she allows her eyes to fall closed, and she sleeps.

 

On the third day of being a girl again, Ahiru is gone.

 

Meanwhile, on the one thousand and twenty-third day, Princess Rue wakes up as though from a haze, hand still outstretched for a glazed bun at the table. A single thought slides into her head, clear as the call of a bird.

“Ahiru,” Rue says, and the name travels across the table, reaches the prince, who opens his eyes, and understands instantly what she means.

 

When they arrive, the door opens before they can think to knock.

“Well, it’s about time,” says Fakir. “How was the honeymoon?”

Rue looks right past his words and sees the lines of worry etched into his face, the crooked shadows under his eyes. “Where is she,” she says, and is not prepared for the way his gaze falls to the floor in shame.

“I don’t know,” he says.

And Rue rises up, teeth bared; somewhere she can hear the rustle of feathers. “How can you not know?” she shouts. “How can you not know something as simple, as important as that—”

A hand, at her shoulder, and Rue slumps into its warmth. 

“Now what are we going to do?” Rue says, and the answer comes obvious, even to her. 

“We do what she did for all of us,” says Mytho beside her, eyes set in determination. “We find her.” 

 

_In the deep of the forest, she wandered. She was a duck—no, she was a girl; the shadows made it hard to tell the difference. She’d lost the sound again, and now there was only the silence of her own clumsy footfalls. The earth was solid under her feet, but she missed the water, what it meant to move oneself and be moved. Here there was nothing but the ground to catch her when her legs got caught up in each other and she fell._

_“Oh, but that’s our silly darling Duck, isn’t she so cute?” someone said, but when she turned to her right, there was no one there. She had imagined it—or perhaps, it was what she had been expecting to hear. Then again, of course, perhaps it was just the wind._

_“You’ve got to get yourself together, Duck,” someone else said, but when she turned to her left, there was no one there, either. “Just like how sensei taught us. Don’t you remember?”_

_The wind was picking up now, twin breezes stroking at her face. “Yes, just like that,” they soothed, as she took one step forward, then another. A pirouette, and the wind ruffled her hair, carried her forward. “It’s all right if you’ve forgotten how to walk, our dear Duck, because we’ll dance with you. Just as how you danced with us, once before.”_

_Yes, she could hear it again; it was faint and muffled by the trees, but it was her guide. She followed the sound, and the wind lifted her arms, as though they were wings._

 

When Mytho opens his eyes, the sky is still dark. A small distance away, embers glow from where a shadow is tending the fire.

“You’re awake,” the shadow says.

Mytho sits up, careful not to disturb Rue from where she is curled around him on the grass, still caught in sleep. “You noticed?” he says.

The firelight shifts, falls over Fakir’s face as he turns to stare at him, and there is a weight there Mytho cannot parse. “When have I not,” he says, with a hard edge to his eyes, as though he is waiting, as though he expects something from him. It has been a while since Mytho regained his heart, but it is one thing to recognize his own emotions, and an entirely different thing to understand them in another. Mytho squints at him, in the half-light of the dying fire, but Fakir’s face reveals nothing.

“You look tired,” Mytho says. The fire flickers in response. “I would have thought…” He rubs at his forehead, absentmindedly. “I would have thought that after everything, you would finally have been able to obtain some peace.”

Something flashes in Fakir’s eyes. “Peace,” he repeats, and it strikes Mytho then that he knows what it is clouding Fakir’s gaze—bitterness. “But you’re right. You are the prince, with your princess—how is your fairy tale of _peace_ going for you while Ahiru—Ahiru is _gone_ —”

“You’re angry,” says Mytho, and he thinks he should be surprised, but he is not. Still, something in him aches at the sight of Fakir’s face, twisted into a scowl. “I don’t think this is how it was supposed to end. Now it’s like we’ve gone back to the beginning, all over again.”

“We’re not in a story anymore, Prince,” Fakir says, and it hurts a little, the way he calls him that instead of his name. “We’re going to find Ahiru, and then you can return to your storybook tale.”

Ahiru. Mytho looks around them, at the thickening trees and their towering shadows, and shivers. It’s cold, even with the hearth beside him. This is no place for a girl—a duck, he reminds himself. They must find her, and soon; there is no other choice.

Surprisingly, it’s Fakir who speaks up once more, voice low, strangely quiet. “You were having a nightmare, weren’t you?”

Mytho blinks. “I was,” he says. He’d almost forgotten, but it comes back to him now. The same dream as always, the one that slips into his sleep on the longest and coldest of nights. “Do you want to know what it was about?”

“No,” says Fakir. The anger is gone. All around them, the sun is beginning to rise, bleeding colour into the sky. He pokes his stick at the last of the embers, which have begun to die out. It strikes Mytho that he looks almost sad. But that can’t be right. “I should think I already know.” 

Watching him with his head bent over the ashes, Mytho remembers that Fakir was awake long before him. He wants to ask if nightmares had plagued his sleep, too, but Fakir is getting to his feet.

“Come on,” says Fakir. “Ahiru’s waiting for us.” He shakes his head, lets out a hardened laugh. “As usual.”

Mytho turns to wake Rue, only to find that her eyes have been open the whole time. In the weak morning light it is hard to tell who she is staring at—Mytho, or the back of Fakir, turning away.

 

_After a time the sound faded away once more, and though she strained her ears, she could not find it again. “Please,” she called, but her voice was so small, so lonely, and not even its echo would linger. She shivered; the winds had died down, and without them her legs wobbled, her dance losing momentum until she was merely stumbling blindly forward._

_“This won’t do,” came a voice at her feet, and she stared down at the cat that curled itself around her legs, warm. “At this rate I will be forced to never take you out of the probationary class. Or…”_

_She was remembering, now, what it was to speak, to hold the weight of words on her tongue. Still, the words themselves did not come easy to her, not yet. “Please,” she repeated, and it was all she could find. “Please.”_

_“But of course,” the cat said. “You are my student, after all. Did you think a teacher would abandon you, and leave you out to dry?” It licked at a paw, purred in contentment. “Show me what you’ve learned, Duck. Show me what I have taught you.”_

_She thought it was odd, to look down at it instead of up, but she could not remember why that was strange. She remembered something else, instead; how to point her toes, thrust her shoulders back, straighten her spine._

_“Yes, that’s right,” the cat said. “The basics, Duck, remember? Here we go, now, Duck; I will dance with you, just as how you danced with me, once before. And you shall see to it that you improve your form, or I really will have you marry me, this time…”_

_The sound was back, thrumming in her ears as she twirled through the trees with the cat weaving in and out between her ankles, leading the way._

 

The way they walk through the forest is in a straight line: Mytho leading in front, Rue in the middle, and Fakir at the back. An old habit, Fakir supposes. From the back it is easier to be on guard, easier to see. He focuses his attention on the forest at first, the silent foreboding trees and the tall silvery grass, ears pricked and eyes alert—though he does not know how useful he will be, if some unseen danger does surface. He has given up his sword a long time ago, and here in the heart of the forest with the wind shivering at his spine, he almost misses it. 

Ahiru, Fakir thinks, has no one to follow at her back, to guard against the dangers. He quickens his pace, and wonders, not for the first time, what on earth a girl like her would be doing in a place like this. 

_Or a duck,_ he thinks. Maybe it is only natural—for a duck to return to the wild—but something in his chest tightens, and he refuses to follow the train of thought to its end. 

In any case, there’s still no way Ahiru can last, all by herself in the depths of the forest. She’s still _Ahiru,_ even despite the time that has passed, even though they have all grown, in their own way. Yes. Fakir can see it, in Mytho’s broadened shoulders, in his height; in the curve of Rue’s waist, the point of her chin. The way they walk, backs straight, legs steady. They have seen stories, and they have lived them, and they are not children, anymore.

“I can feel you staring at him so hard you might fall over,” Rue says without looking back at him “Cut it out.”

Fakir misses a step and really does almost fall over, but catches himself just in time. “What are you talking about?” he snaps, hoping his face isn’t as red as it feels. “I’m—I’m not staring at either of you!” But that’s not true. He wonders with a start when he had stopped looking at the trees, and started watching Mytho and Rue instead.

Rue does stop, then, swivelling on one heel to stare at him, eyebrows arched. “Me?” she repeats. “I thought it would have been just him…” 

She trails off, and then both of them are stuck watching Mytho walk on, oblivious to their conversation, to how they have stopped. The tall grass seems to bend at his feet, swaying in the wind, almost clearing up a path. Through the canopies of leaves overhead, a trickle of sunlight spills softly down, alighting on his head like the circle of a crown. He stops abruptly, and Fakir tenses, but Mytho is merely bending down to the ground, cradling something in his hands. A baby bird that has fallen out of his nest.

“Fakir? Rue?” Mytho turns around for the first time. “What are you doing so far behind? Come help me put this bird back in its tree.”

“He’s hopeless,” Fakir says with a sigh.

“The worst,” Rue agrees. 

They follow him together.

 

_She was alone. Even the sound had left; even the cat had disappeared back into the shadows of the forest, and try as she might, she could not remember how to extend one leg in front of the other, how to lift her arms and propel herself forward. But had she really ever known it, in the first place?_

_“Shh,” something sighed, all around her. She was standing in a garden of flowers, and their petals rustled in the breeze. “You haven’t forgotten. You’ve always known, haven’t you? What it means, to have grace.”_

_The flowers were so lovely, rising up on stalks and stems to caress her waist, lift her feet off the ground. “What it means, to dance.” A light wind picked her hair up off her shoulders, and settled it back down. “To convey your heart and share it, so that everyone may see the beauty that lies within.”_

_One step, then another. It was coming back to her now. If she strained her ears hard enough, she could pick it back up again – the sound from the depths of the forest. “It’s okay if you’ve forgotten, Duck, because everything will come clear to you when you dance. When you show your heart.”_

_The flowers stirred, buds bursting into bloom. “I will dance with you, Duck, just as how you danced with me, once before,” they said as one, and it sounded like the voice of a girl. And as flower after flower sprang up, she thought about how lucky she was to be able to see and share in their beauty as they moved on through the darkness of the trees._

 

Something about this forest is not right.

Something about this forest is disturbing her, but Rue says nothing, because she’s not sure of it herself. She doesn’t like to dwell on the shadows stretching around them, the tall trees that remind her of feathers, stalks embedded into the earth. So instead she turns her attentions inward, for something about themselves is not right, either. The stirring in her chest, where something had once beat; not a pulse but the weight of wings. The way Mytho sits by the fire, staring into the distance, into the spaces between the trees, a line furrowing his brow. The way Fakir watches the both of them, but only when he believes they are not looking back; how the lingering of his gaze feels like something else, like the longing of a secret that has been left unsaid. And above all, the empty spot in their circle, where a girl—or a duck—should be.

“Do you think we’ll find her?” Rue says before she can stop herself, and regrets it almost immediately. Fakir is bristling, eyes cutting towards her, and the hostility they hold is familiar—a reminder of how it used to be, before Ahiru danced into their lives, before Mytho found his heart, before Fakir put down his sword and before Rue remembered anything of the bird blood in her body. Back when every word between them felt like a war. 

“What kind of a question is that?” Fakir says. “Of course we’ll find her, there is no other way—” 

But it’s what Mytho says next that stuns the both of them into silence. 

“Do you think she wants to be found?”

“What do you mean?” Rue says after a moment. “Why wouldn’t she want to be found?” She touches at her throat, absentmindedly. “Everyone wants to be found.”

“She’s a duck, now,” Mytho says, and he looks down at his palms laid out on his lap, as though remembering the weight of the flightless baby bird in his hands. “Maybe she—maybe she wanted to go back. To her home.” He raises his head, and now Rue can see his face, full of sorrow.

“No,” Fakir snarls. “Her home is not here. Her home is—” And he falls silent, eyes brooding with a storm. For some reason this upsets Rue even more than what Mytho had said—how Fakir won’t look them in the eyes, finish his sentence—so she digs deep and finds it in herself to prod him further. It’s easy, like fuelling an old fire, one that’s still been burning, all this time. 

“How does a duck just disappear, anyway?” she snaps at him. “Why would she leave? What did you do, to make her leave—”

“Me?” says Fakir. “I wasn’t the ones who walked away into my happy ending and _never came back,_ not even to visit, not once, even while knowing she was a duck and she wouldn’t have her friends anymore, wouldn’t be able to dance or do any of the things she’d loved anymore—I wasn’t the ones who _left_ —”

They fall into an uneasy silence. Rue’s eyes burn; not with anger, she realizes, but with something worse. She tries to blink them away, but the tears are coming, and there is nothing she can do to stop them. She can almost hear his voice in her ears—the terrible caw of a crow— _weak as usual, girl, and you call yourself a Princess?..._

Mytho has placed an arm around her shoulder, and she leans into it. Catches the glint that flashes through Fakir’s eyes, then disappears just as fast. 

“How could I?” Rue says numbly. “How could I have forgotten her, even if she is a duck? She didn’t forget me, when I was a crow. No, she followed after me. She flew with me…”

“I don’t know how, either,” Mytho says. The light of the fire flickers shadows across his face. “It was like… It was like the story had ended, and all there was left to do was fill out the spaces left behind, go through the motions. There were quite many things that needed to be done in the castle… The meetings… The parties… The golden chandeliers and rose-filled vases and the glazed buns at the table…”

“It has been a long time,” Rue realizes, “since either of us last danced.”

“So that’s it, then?” says Fakir, the fight gone from his voice. “You got caught up in the story, and forgot to live. Forgot you had friends.”

“And you?” Rue says. “Did you live, then?”

Fakir scowls at her. A cold wind picks up, and the fire shudders, but stays burning. Rue wipes at her eyes, wets her lips. 

“We’re going to find her,” she says, and the steel in her voice leaves no room for doubt. Still, she finds it takes a long time for sleep to come to her, that night.

 

_Somewhere in the middle of her wandering, the flowers had fallen away and disappeared without a trace, so when she realized she had lost the sound again, there was nothing and no one to comfort her. Her steps became stumbles; her twirls shed their spin. Her path lost its direction, and she came to a confused stop._

_Then, in the distance. A flicker of light._

_“I’m just a little thing,” came a voice, “but I flood the entire room. What am I?”_

_The girl shivered. “I don’t know,” she said, but even as she said so, it didn’t feel quite right. She did know, didn’t she? A long time ago, she had known._

_“I am a white snake that swallows the sea, and my head is all red. What am I?”_

_The light was bobbing in the distance, and she instinctively took a step towards it._

_“I become shorter the longer I stand. What am I?”_

_The light danced away, as though just out of reach. “I don’t know, anymore,” the girl said. “I think I must have forgotten.”_

_“That’s too bad,” said the voice. “It is a terrible thing to be forgotten. But it’s all right. I’ll help you remember, if you come with me.”_

_The girl took another step towards the light, then hesitated. It looked so very far away, and the shadows around her were growing as the night deepened._

_“You mustn’t fear the darkness,” said the voice. “For it is in the darkness where we shine the brightest, and where we can leave a trail of light for others to find us, once again.”_

_“Others?” the girl repeated. “Others, to find us?”_

_“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten them, too,” the voice said. “Ah, don’t worry about it. Your shine will be bright enough for them to follow. For now, just focus on your path, and allow me to illuminate the way forward. I will dance with you, Duck, just as how you danced with me, once before.”_

_The sound had returned, with the light moving back and forth to its rhythm, and the girl followed._

 

This time when Mytho wakes up, it is to find both Fakir and Rue sitting up and staring at him. How odd, and how strangely fitting, he thinks, that the two of them have unconsciously banded closer together, sitting next to each other by the fire, for they’ve always shared similarities, haven’t they? The burden of their fates written onto their hearts, since childhood, since Mytho has known them. The pain they work so hard to bury, thinking he can’t see it burning bright like a fire inside them. How they have followed him since before even he himself knew he was a prince, like the needle of a compass that only knows how to point north. Even now, the way both of them look at him is exactly the same. Like he is the answer to some question they have been chasing all their lives, and Mytho is unsure of what to do with this responsibility. It reminds him of being a prince in the story, a crown atop his head, a sword in his hand and nothing to shatter but his own heart.

“You were having a nightmare again,” says Fakir. 

“You’ve always had them,” Rue whispers, almost to herself. “Even though everything’s over and done with. Sometimes in the night I’d wake up, and you would be lying there, so still I feared you were dead. That was how I knew when you were having a nightmare. And I would hold you, and pretend to sleep, and in the morning you would smile at me as though nothing had happened… I think that’s what scared me the most, even more than the thought of what haunts your sleep at night.”

They’re both still looking at him. His dreams, Mytho supposes, are the one place they cannot follow after him. The one thing they cannot save him from. 

Though he can see now that it doesn’t stop them from trying. Fakir is staring at his hands, as though he doesn’t know what to do with them. This time, he asks. “What is it you dream of?”

Mytho closes his eyes and remembers. Coarse black feathers, scraping against the confines of his shirt collar, wanting release. Every mirror shard reflecting beady red eyes back at him. Blood, on his hands, on his lips, running thick and heavy. But none of this is what scares him, as he dances in the spotlight, scraping himself on broken glass; no—what makes him jolt awake in terror every time is the thickness of the void around him, an emptiness so bleak he can feel it seep into his bones, fill him up from the inside out—

“I dreamed of being alone,” Mytho says, and he is not surprised to see the recognition in their eyes, reflecting firelight. “What is it you dream of, Fakir?”

“I told you,” Fakir says, so quiet he can barely hear. “I know what you dream of. I dream of it, too.”

They huddle there beside the fire in silence for a few long moments. 

“Well, we’re not alone,” says Rue suddenly, with a fierceness that surprises them all – perhaps even herself. “We found each other, and it’s up to us to find Ahiru. Even if—” she hesitates— “even if she doesn’t want to come back. We at least owe it to her to say goodbye. We owe it to her, to let her know none of us is alone anymore, and it’s all thanks to her. She’d like to know something like that, wouldn’t she?”

For some strange reason there is a small smile on Fakir’s face. Mytho watches it in amazement—he has almost forgotten what it looked like. “She’d think it’s a fine story,” Fakir says. “The very best.”

Mytho reaches out to hold Rue’s hand. A split second later he realizes he’s extended his other arm, as well, but before he can consider withdrawing it, Fakir has already taken it. The three of them sit there, hands linked in a circle around the fire, until the dawn rises up all around them. 

 

_When the light flickered out it was with no warning. The girl came to a halt and looked all around her, but it was futile, for the light had disappeared, and it seemed to have taken the sound with it._

_“Hello?” she called out. “Are you still there?” But her own words echoed back at her, and there was something else, too, making it hard to see. Something thicker than the shadows—a fog, clinging to the air like smoke. “Who’s there?”_

_Through the fog, she thought she could see something. The glint of a sword. A phantom pain pricked at her side, and she flinched, as though cut with a blade, as though remembering._

_“Are you afraid of me?” the voice said._

_If she squinted her eyes, she could just make out the shape of a mask in the likeness of a bird’s curved beak, and the lines of it were hard and cruel. But she recognized the grief there, in the way it hung its head, and that was what made her take a step forward, say, “No, I’m not.”_

_“And that is rather foolish of you,” the voice said. “But it was you who relieved me the weight of my sword. You showed me that my battle was over, and that my story had ended.”_

_“Your story had ended?” the girl repeated aloud. “Stories don’t end.” She couldn’t be sure of why she believed this—just that she did feel that way, so strongly she wanted to burst._

_“Ah,” said the voice, “mine did, but that is because I am a ghost. You, on the other hand, are a person, not a story.” A pause. “Or are you a duck?”_

_“I can’t remember,” the girl admitted. “But I think it’s starting to come back to me, now.” Sure enough, the sound had come alive again, steady through the knots of the tangled trees._

_“Fair enough,” said the voice. “Then I will dance with you, little Duck, just as how you danced with me, once before.” And dance they did, through the clouds of fog that obscured the darkness of the night._

 

In the distance a crow calls, and Rue’s hand flies to her chest. 

“It’s just a bird,” says Mytho, at her side.

“So is Ahiru,” says Rue, staring out at the web of trees that lie before them. It is late afternoon, and Rue is tired. Her legs are sore from the distance they have walked—so much further than she has needed to walk in a long, long time. She can’t imagine what the pain must be like for Ahiru. Ducks, after all, are made to swim, not walk, nor fly. Nor dance. She means to say some of this aloud, but her throat is dry. 

Something in her is stirring. Something about this forest. Something wild, and so surely she can be forgiven for missing the strange look in Fakir’s eyes, at her words. 

“I forgot,” she rasps. “In the cold light of the castle I forgot. I was happy, I think, and there was peace, and warm bread, ivory walls and silk sheets, but I forgot I used to be a wild thing. Now I am remembering. I remember what it was to be a crow.”

Mytho’s hand closes over hers. “So do I,” he says.

“And I remember,” Rue continues, “what it was like to live my days marked with grief, but most of all, I remember what it was that saved me. Who it was, who loved me.” She turns to the two of them, and they look uncertain; she must make them understand, must let them know. The truth of it all is tilting through her head, flipping past like the pages of a book, like the dance of fallen leaves on the wind: a smile she received on the eve of the Fire Festival, her fate being unwritten from where she lay in the heart of the raven she once called her father, a window opening behind her on the roof from where a figure reached for her on the sill and called her by her name, her one and only name, Rue, Rue, _Rue-chan…_

“Mytho,” says Rue. “You saved me first, and last. Fakir, even you, I realize that now, you saved me, too. But it was her—it was Ahiru who saved me when all else had turned their back, when all else had lost faith in me, even myself.” Her face is wet, her throat ragged. “Ahiru called my name when even I had forgotten what it was. And now she’s gone, and how could I have forgotten?”

“It doesn’t fit the story, does it?” Fakir speaks up for the first time, and his gaze is strangely heavy. “Where does the girl—where does the duck belong with the princess, in the happily ever after?”

“Or the prince,” says Mytho.

“Or the fallen knight,” says Fakir, and he clenches his hand into a fist.

The three of them stand there for a long while, in the middle of the forest, until Rue can’t take it anymore and falls to her knees.

“Oh, Ahiru,” she says, hopelessly, into the silence of the wind. “Where are you? Where have you gone? I’m sorry the story tried to write you out of it, out of us. Please, Ahiru—please. We love you. We love you.”

There is not even an echo in reply. But instead, there is warmth by her side. Rue looks up to see Mytho at her right, extending a hand; Fakir at her left, meeting her gaze for the first time in a long time. When she stands, it is to receive them both. They look at her, and she nods.

“We love you,” she repeats, not to the wind, but to the three of them. Then: “Let’s go. All that’s left to do is tell her.”

 

_When the fog lifted she saw a strange shape in the distance. Another person, she thought—at last, she was not alone anymore—but as she approached it she realized it stood earthly still. There was no upward lift, no downward lilt to show it breathed. For though the face was that of a youthful girl, it was carved from stone. A statue._

_“Dear little Duck,” came a voice. “Can you hear it?”_

_“The sound?” asked the girl. “Yes, I still hear it.” For this time the sound had not faded; she could hear it pulsing in her ears, among the trees._

_“No, not that,” said the voice. “I ask if you can hear what I was once tasked with delivering, long ago. Words precious to the ear, for they come from the heart, buried for so long they become laced in one’s breaths. Can you hear it, Duck? Can you hear the voices on the wind?”_

_The girl strained her ears to listen, but all she could hear was the sound she had been following all this time._

_“Can you hear the call of your name,” said the voice, “or have you forgotten what it is?”_

_And there, faint on the furthest echoes of the stirring winds, came the echoes that had been chasing after her and now spilled at her feet—_ Please. We love you. We love you.

 

“Rue-chan?” says Ahiru.

 

_“I think,” said the girl, and she shivered. “I think I have forgotten something important.”_

_“It’s all right,” said the voice. The girl studied the statue, and thought that it had really been quite magnificently carved. Whoever had wielded the chisel must have taken great care, must have held such love in his hands as he traced the curve of her cheek and immortalized it into art. This, too, she thought, was a love letter; one written and received, and remembered. “For I will dance with you, little Duck, just as how you danced with me, once before.”_

_The whispers on the wind were fading, and so she followed all that was left: the sound beckoning her onward from the depths of the trees beyond._

 

This time when Mytho sleeps, he dreams of something else. At first, it begins the same way, with the darkness all around him, but after a while he realizes he is not alone. There is a soft pink light, and someone stands before him, someone who matches him height for height. A mirror, Mytho thinks; but no, they are not the same. One is his heart, and one is himself.

“But you’ve already come back to me, now,” says Mytho, fear leaping into his throat—this can’t be real, he can’t be empty. He won’t be empty, ever again.

The other Mytho, slightly tinged with pale red, smiles at him. He lifts an arm and reaches out, traces a finger down from Mytho’s shoulder and stops over a spot on his chest, slightly to the left. “Do you remember,” he says, “what it was like to live without me?”

“In my dreams,” Mytho says, and he trembles.

“Do you remember,” says his heart, “what it was, to cast me away?”

Mytho closes his eyes. 

“Why did you do it?” He opens his hand, rests his palm against Mytho’s chest, presses down.

“Because I had no other choice,” Mytho whispers. “Because I was the prince.”

“It’s not a choice if it’s already been written,” the other Mytho says. He leans in close, with a sigh. “Don’t forget. You always have a choice.”

Yes, Mytho thinks, he does. He knows. He made his choices, long ago, when he let Fakir stand at his shoulder, when he took Rue’s hand at the end of it all, when he followed the girl with feathers in her hair—feathers for hair?—and fell into dance with her, and it led him to his heart, every time. But that doesn’t mean he’s stopped choosing. Maybe he forgot for a while, but now he realizes that to make a choice is to choose it every day, as long as he lives—and that, too, is a kind of choosing. To live. 

“Thank you,” Mytho says, looking his heart in the eye, and then—like an afterthought— “I’m sorry for casting you away.”

The other Mytho laughs, then. “It’s all right,” he says. “It was lonely, but you found me again, and that, too, was a choice. As long as you find what it is you’ve lost along the way. As long as you don’t forget…”

This time he wakes up before the others, and in the quiet of the dawn he tends the fire, until Fakir blinks open his eyes, until Rue stretches her arms out above her head, stifles a yawn in the palm of her fist.

“You’re up early,” Fakir says. “You should have woken us.”

Mytho smiles. “Why would I do that? You’re never so calm and peaceful as you are in sleep.”

Rue doesn’t bother hiding her laugh as Fakir scowls, ducking his head away as though to conceal the redness of his cheeks. The rising sun is warm, drowsy, and their faces are still soft with sleep, so perhaps that’s what makes Fakir shake his head, frown at Mytho.

“You know what I don’t understand,” says Fakir. “You remembered your name—Siegfried—but you still chose to keep Mytho, instead.”

“Of course I did,” Mytho says. “It was what you named me. And you were the first person who made me real.” He pauses for a moment, struck by a thought. “‘And the prince is just a story…’”

“What’s that quote from?” Fakir says, curious. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.”

“An old story,” says Mytho. “I once thought it was over. But now I’m beginning to see that stories only end if we choose for them to.”

“Well, then, why don’t we find out how it goes,” says Rue. Her hair is mussed, sticking up all around her face, and it’s unbecoming for a princess. It reminds Mytho of a girl with a tuft of hair protruding straight up on her head, like a beacon waiting to be found.

“Let’s,” Mytho agrees. They leave the fire burning.

 

_The days were growing colder, now, and her movement was slower, more sluggish. She was starting to realize more and more of her body; the ache in her legs, the sores on her feet, the gnawing hunger in her belly. She shivered—what a weakness it was to realize one’s body. She longed to rest, but she had come so far, for so long. To stop now would surely mean she could never start again._

_When she came across the river, the day was late, and the low-hanging sun stared glassily up at her from the water’s surface, obscuring her own reflection. Wind rustled through the tall weeds and grasses, and it sounded like a thousand whispers all together, the ends of their voices lilting up into questions: “Who goes there? Who are you? What are you—girl or duck?”_

_“I don’t think I’m quite one or the other,” she said. “Maybe I will always be a bit of both. Maybe I won’t ever be able to fit in just one word, or the other, and maybe that doesn’t matter.”_

_“Is that so?” The voices were faint, and she leaned closer to the river. The ripples were clearing, and for a moment she thought she could almost make out her own face. “Well, I suppose you shall see. Everything always becomes clear, in the end. You’re almost there, you know.”_

_“I know,” she said, because the sound was growing louder, steadily, and she felt its reverberations like the beat of her pulse._

_“Follow me, then,” said the river, “and you shall find where it is you are going, but more importantly, you will find that it is not so far away from where you began. It feels a bit like a dance, doesn’t it? Do you remember, what it is to dance?”_

_“Yes,” she said, because it was true, and she raised her arms above her head, lifted up onto the points of her toes._

_“Then dance,” said the river, or maybe the thousands of voices carrying on the wind that had been following her all this time, leading the way, “just as you danced with all of us, once before…”_

 

It’s a little hard to tell who’s in front or behind, now; all of them are aligned under one goal, and they follow it. The three of them are quieter, but perhaps that’s because they have nothing left to say.

_But that’s not entirely true, is it,_ something at the back of Fakir’s mind whispers, and it sounds like what a narrator would say, high and mighty from the safety of the other side of the story, from a distance, and he clenches a fist, grits his teeth. There is none of that, he decides—no story, no author, no machinations or puppet strings leading the way. There is only himself, stark and stubborn and alone, and for a moment he hates himself for it. Maybe if this _was_ a story, maybe if someone else was writing it, maybe then he’d act better, be better. Maybe then he’d be able to find Ahiru.

The thing is, though, he _isn’t_ alone. Fakir lifts his head and frowns at the two figures before him, making their way through the grass. Mytho with his pale head of white hair, Rue in her torn dress with ruffles like feathers. When they’d first showed up at his door he’d thought perhaps he was still stuck in a dream, and even now he half expects them to disappear when he blinks, for they don’t look like they belong here at all, amidst the trees and earth and wild growth. 

“I’m worried about Ahiru,” Rue says suddenly. Fakir jumps, and quickly casts his gaze away. “We still haven’t found her, and this forest doesn’t seem like it will ever end.”

“What choice do we have but to keep going?” says Mytho.

“I just—” Rue’s lower lip trembles. “I can’t stop thinking about what you said, about what if she doesn’t want to come back. And even if we do find her, how are we going to talk with her? How can she tell us, if she doesn’t want to come back? If she doesn’t want us here? We did leave her, after all, and she’s a duck, and maybe she doesn’t want us to remind her, of the days when she could dance…”

Fakir looks between the two of them, and he doesn’t understand it, he decides. Mytho with the top of his head looking awfully empty, like a crown should be sitting there. Rue with tears filling her eyes, her lush gown filled with holes, torn by brambles. He doesn’t understand it, and that’s what makes him say, finally, swallowing to get past the ache of guilt in his throat— “Not a duck. A girl.”

The silence is the worst of it, sinking into the space around them. But it can’t last, and it doesn’t.

“What do you mean?” says Mytho, but it’s Rue’s gaze that scares Fakir, sharp, piercing, like the curved beak of a crow, like the toes of a ballerina _en pointe,_ like someone who remembers what it meant to be both those things. 

“I wrote it,” Fakir says, and it hurts coming out of his throat, hurts to feel the weight of his words in the air, becoming real. It hurts to create; he wishes he’d known this, before he had tried, before he had picked up the pen in his hands. “I’d been trying for so long—I didn’t think it would work, but it did. One day she was a bunch of feathers splashing around in the shallows and the next—” He swallows, again. “I thought it was what she wanted. But now she’s gone, and I didn’t know—”

“Why would she leave, if she were human again?” Mytho says, bemused.

Fakir rubs at his forehead, tries to form the right words for it. “She was acting strange,” he says. “Sometimes it was like she wasn’t seeing me clearly, or maybe she wasn’t remembering me right. She was having trouble adjusting—I think she’d gotten used to being a duck. I think maybe she forgot what it was to be a girl. And if she’d forgotten that—” he swallows— “do you think it’s possible that she might have forgotten everything else, too?”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Rue says, her voice low, tense. The lock of a bird’s bones before it spreads its wings into flight. “What makes you think you had the right to keep something like this from us—”

“She was the one who didn’t want to tell you,” Fakir shouts, because it’s easy, and familiar, and maybe this is all he knows how to do. In the end, the fight finds him like a home. “For you to come all this way, for the sake of a little duck, or a little girl—You’re the Princess, and the Prince. Why are any of you even here? It’s what I still can’t understand—why you would leave your castle, your happy ending, and come all the way out here into the wild. You chose your story, and it’s over now, isn’t it? You didn’t have any need for her, do you? So why are you here, now?”

Rue steps up to him then, and the flash of her eyes, Fakir thinks, is sharper than any sword he’s faced in battle. He thinks maybe he’s said too much. He braces himself, ready for a blow, but for some strange reason, she isn’t saying a thing. Mytho, meanwhile, is coming up next to her, and the look on his eyes is terribly soft in contrast, so it’s even worse.

“You keep saying for _her,_ ” Rue says at last, and the slow bluntness of it, the way she drags the truth it out over her tongue and through her teeth, feels as though the raven has come back to claw through his heart and tear him in two. “But what you really mean is for _you,_ isn’t it? For her—that, you can believe. That, you can believe, because you’d do anything for her, too. What you won’t believe is that we came back for you.”

“Stop it,” Fakir hisses, but Mytho’s reaching out, putting a hand on his arm, gentle, and he freezes.

“Oh, Fakir,” says Mytho, “I’m sorry. Did you think… Did you really think we came only for Ahiru?” He takes a step forward, and Fakir automatically falls back. “Did you think we had forgotten about you?”

Fakir turns away. “Well, you did, didn’t you?” he says, suddenly exhausted. 

Mytho hesitates. Even now, Fakir knows, he will not lie. 

“That was our wrong,” says Mytho, “not yours,” and all Fakir can think is, wildly— _wasn’t it?_ When he kept Mytho from his own heart, when he refused to trust Rue, when he tried to intimidate Ahiru from dancing into their lives and saving them all? The failure of a knight, making all the wrong choices, again and again—and even after everything had passed, he was still the one to tear them away from their happy ending, writing Ahiru back when she’d never been gone in the first place, until now— _until now_ —

“Fakir,” Mytho says. A hand on his chest. Fakir wonders if he can feel the beat there, like a frenzied bird trapped under his palm. “Fakir, look at me.”

What else can he do, when faced with a prince? Fakir tilts his chin up, and tries to meet his eyes, but he ends up getting caught up in Rue’s gaze instead, staring back at him from over Mytho’s shoulder. Her eyes are dark, and her face reveals nothing, but surprisingly she is the one to speak, holding his gaze even as Mytho keeps his hand clasped over his heart.

“We came back for Ahiru, that’s true,” Rue says, a strange tremble to her voice, though her gaze does not waver. “But what we found was you.”

Fakir flinches—it would have hurt less for her to run him through with a rusty blade. But she isn’t done talking.

“And now, we’re still looking for Ahiru, to find all of us,” Rue continues. The weight of her gaze is so, so heavy. “Do you understand what I am saying?”

It’s Mytho who confirms it for him, with a sigh, with a shake of his head. “Fakir, you saved us both,” and he sounds almost breathless. “How can you have forgotten? You, not the knight, not the writer, but something much more important than that. My first, dearest friend.”

“Do you understand what I am saying?” Rue repeats, and the tremble in her voice, Fakir realizes, might be from desperation. “To find all of us – for we’re not complete. Not without her, and…”

“Not without you,” Mytho finishes.

Around them, the skeletal trees shivering in the wind. It is cold, so cold, and Ahiru is still missing, and how can he have it in himself to hope —standing there before the two of them, so still, so immovable—how can he have it in himself to dare—

Mytho breaks into a smile, and it is unlike anything Fakir has ever seen before, through all their years together. He has only been allowed hints of it, when watching Mytho dance with Ahiru, and when he had turned to Rue at his side and taken her hand. And now, here it is—for him, too. All the breath falls out of him, just like that.

They stand in silence for several long moments. Somewhere, a bird calls, long and lonely, and Fakir feels it like a strike to the heart.

“I understand,” Fakir says, as if in reply to the bird call, but he stands straighter, meets Rue’s eye. “I understand.”

“Silly,” Mytho says. “Of course you do.” He clenches his hand on Fakir’s chest into a fist, grabbing hold of his shirt, pulling him forward towards them. Fakir stumbles forward, too close, and their foreheads knock together, all three of them. Fakir freezes—he can’t help it—and Rue catches it, slanting her gaze towards him; lets out a laugh. The flash of her teeth is blinding.

Fakir shakes his head, but he does not pull back. “You’re all so—” and he does not have a word for it. He thinks it is unbecoming for a writer to not be able to come up with the words. But maybe he wasn’t fit to be one, anyway. He remembers his old days, when he would swear by his sword, and the harsh light that glinted off its edge would blind him; when he looked at Mytho and couldn’t see past the sun that shone over his shoulder. But that pain seems so long ago. Rather, it is the will to protect that is still there, solid in his bones, only now he knows there are other ways to do so, than to lay down his life. Maybe it just means, to live.

“Yeah?” Rue says. Fakir looks at them both in amazement—Rue with her hair mussed, grime on her face, grinning; Mytho’s shoulders shaking from quiet laughter, a light in his eyes. He thinks he has never seen them look more alive. “We’re what?”

“We’re missing someone,” Fakir says. 

She is near. He can sense it; perhaps they can all sense it. Like a longing in their bones, for home. Mytho extends a hand, and Rue takes it; she turns to Fakir, then, and offers her other. A dance none has ever seen before, and yet none of them let go of each other as they turn towards the trees and walk on.

 

_She was almost there; she could feel it. The whispers on the wind urging her on, towards the sound, as she quickened her pace, stumbled over the rocks and grasses. The river was widening, opening into a mouth, and then a lake—and there, in the shallows of the water, a flicker of movement—three shadowy figures twirling around each other, dancing—_

_She knew this. She knew this like she knew a story, or a dream. Cautiously, she took one step forward, then another. Hazy mist rose from the waters all around her; the tall reeds rustled in the wind. On the surface of the lake, a prince danced, with a princess, with a knight._

_“Oh,” she breathed. For it was a beautiful sight. The prince’s crown glittered from where it sat in his head of white hair; the princess’s dress spilled out around her in glowing gauzy white; the knight bowed his head and spun them both, on and on into the night. From this distance, she could not make out their faces. And what a wonderful thing it was, to be able to watch something so beautiful, oh!_

_But the reeds were still rustling, and the wind was still whispering in her ear: “Have you forgotten, little duck, what it is to dance?”_

_She stopped. Took a step backwards. “No,” she said, “I can’t—I don’t belong here.”_

_“Why?” the reeds whispered, their trembling beginning to grow in intensity, as the wind shook them into a frenzied dance. “Where, then, do you belong?”_

_She thought, if she could just remember—there was something hovering in her mind just out of her reach, and if she could just remember—_

_“A lonely dance it is, for three,” the reeds were saying. Or maybe it was the wind. Or maybe it was just a tiny little voice in her head, as it had been all this time. “But even lonelier still for one. Surely you can reach out, and take their hands. Look how they long for you. Don’t be selfish, little duck. What would it hurt?”_

_She squinted out over the water, at the faceless figures. Something about their dance did seem a little cold—but it wasn’t because they were missing a dancer. Rather, she thought, it was because they were not anyone at all._

_“Where are their faces?” she whispered, as the wind whipped her hair all about her face. “Who are they? The prince, the princess, the knight – how can that be enough to let them know who they are?” She fell back a step. “And who would I be, among them?”_

_The three figures danced noiselessly, gliding over the surface of the water. “The duck,” she said, and it was beginning to come back to her now, maybe—a glint of light gleaming through the static in her mind, piercing— “and I think once upon a time, that would have made me ashamed. Once upon a time I would have backed away because ducks are not fit to dance with princes, or princesses, or knights, and certainly not all three of them. But I know now. Today I back away because I know that I am not just a duck, and I don’t seek to dance with just a prince, or a princess, or a knight.”_

_She swallowed. The figures dancing on the water seemed to be fading a little, their forms blurred, indistinct. Suddenly she knew what it was she felt thundering in her pulse, beating in time with the sound that still beckoned at her from just beyond the way, the one she had been following all this time. A longing so deep it ached in her bones. She opened her mouth to speak—_

 

“I want to dance with my friends,” Ahiru says. “The ones who know my name. Where—” and the wind grows louder, howling, shaking at her feet— “Where are they? Where have I gone?”

 

It’s Mytho who finds her, in the end. 

They’ve been walking for a while, following the path of the river, when he suddenly draws to a stop, earthly still. His spine tensing rigid, and then the loosening of his shoulders, the slight shudder that seems to wrack his whole body like a sigh. Like it’s over. Like she’s safe. Rue’s heart flies into her throat, but it’s Fakir who moves first, rushing past them both, and Rue stays rooted to the spot, because she can’t quite bring herself to step forward, not yet. She doesn’t know what they’ve found—duck or girl, alive or— _no,_ she won’t even think about that—

“Ahiru,” Fakir says, but it comes out as a gasp, like the breath’s been knocked out of him. Rue brings herself to look, at last, and there is no broken bundle of feathers curled up in the grass. No body, either. Just the shadowed figure of a barefoot girl standing at the edge of the lake, staring out over the waters as though she sees something there. Rue cranes her neck, but as far as she can tell, nothing but fog clings to the glassy surface of the lake.

Then Ahiru is turning her head to look at them, and her eyes are crinkling, mouth turning up into a smile. “There you are,” she says, and her voice comes out scratchy, hoarse. “I was just thinking of you—I was just wondering where you were.” She laughs. “Of course, though. It would make sense that you were all right here, all along.”

Fakir drops to his knees, right there against the grass. His eyes are wide, like they still don’t believe, despite seeing her right in front of them, right there. Mytho still hasn’t moved, his entire body sagging with relief, reaching out with a hand to steady himself, and Rue takes it, can’t bring herself to meet Ahiru’s eyes, because—

“I’m sorry,” Fakir blurts out, and Rue hears it like an echo in her own mind, looks away in shame.

“What for?” Ahiru says, as though in surprise.

“For—for not thinking about what you wanted,” Fakir says, voice trembling under the weight of his guilt. “For trying to write your story, when I didn’t have the right, and when it went against everything we believed in, against everything we had fought for—” He chokes off, then swallows, visibly. He looks exhausted. “For thinking you needed to be saved.”

“For leaving,” Mytho says suddenly. “For forgetting. For not coming back.”

In the brief pause that follows Rue thinks that this is it, that it’s her turn now, that there is something she should be saying, should be apologizing for, but the moment drags on a little too long and Ahiru is beating her to it like always.

“But you did come back, didn’t you?” Ahiru’s still smiling, and she looks mystified. As though she can’t understand why Fakir is on her knees for her, why Mytho can’t stand without clasping Rue’s hand for support, why Rue isn’t looking her in the eye. The only thing she doesn’t seem to be unsure of is why they are here, as though it is something she has known for a long time, even before they themselves were called back. “You’re here now. You found me, when I needed you most—” She breaks off, then, and Rue knows that if she looks up, she will see that Ahiru has turned to look at her. She can feel her gaze on her, heavy, and if she looks up, Ahiru will meet her eyes, and then she will see everything that lies there, and some part of Rue’s body shivers at that, some part of her that still remembers being a bird more than being a girl, some part that now thinks of flight. The bend of her knees and the lock of her arms, they beg for it—to lift off and leave and never look back—

“But I see now, that maybe it is also when you needed me most, too,” Ahiru says, thoughtful. She takes a step forward, and then she lifts her wrists above her head, stretches up onto the tips of her toes. Rue recoils back, like she’s been struck. For a moment Rue thinks she sees a shadow superimposed onto Ahiru’s figure—one with a crown of feathers in her hair, ribbons trailing from her skirt—but it flickers briefly and is gone, and there is only Ahiru, raising her chin, smiling. As there was only ever just Ahiru. 

“Mytho,” Ahiru says. Her eyes turn to him, and her smile is sweet. “Do you remember the first time we danced? Not Princess Tutu, not to give back shards of your heart, but just you and I, for the sake of dancing.”

Mytho smiles. “Yes,” he says, and he sounds far away, as though reliving the memory. “It was the day of the Fire Festival.” He looks down at his hands. Rue, too, remembers that day. Meeting Ahiru, and how easy it had been to believe what she said, with her eyes shining, as though genuine. Waiting for hours in the cold, watching all the other couples dancing in the plaza, cursing herself for trusting a stranger, for trusting anyone. And then Mytho showing up after all, taking her hand and leading her into their dance, and when she looked into his eyes she was shocked to see something other than her own reflection looking back at her. But that wasn’t what had scared her, Rue remembers. What had scared her was recognizing the softness of his smile in Ahiru’s, earlier that day—both of them looking at her with that open honesty, sudden vulnerability she had never known and didn’t know how to be responsible for. Didn’t know how to face, when she had suppressed it in herself, all that time. So she had picked up her skirts and run. Flight over fight every time—at least until the crow that called itself her father had taught her what it meant to be a monster. Made her bird beak hunger for a heart.

“And Fakir,” Ahiru says. “Do you remember the first time we danced?”

Fakir winces. Rue doesn’t blame him, remembering the way Fakir had overpowered Ahiru on the stage, cornering her into the shadows and caging her with barely restrained aggression. Less a dance, than an act of violence. But she’s in no position to judge him, and her heart leaps into her throat as Ahiru finally turns towards her— _no, don’t say it—don’t make me remember—_

“Rue,” Ahiru says, breathy, eyes shining just like the day of the Fire Festival, only now there is nowhere to run. “Do you remember the first time we danced?”

Rue closes her eyes in shame. Thinks of how she’d picked Ahiru out from the crowd because she had known it would highlight her own grace. Twirling and lifting her as though she weighed as light as a feather—and even still how Ahiru gasped in wonder. Had smiled at her, through it all. But above everything, Rue thinks, what comes back to her now is how soft Ahiru’s hand had been, in hers.

“I do,” Rue says, and it comes out as an apology, but Ahiru is still holding that strange, knowing smile. Gentle.

“Good,” Ahiru says, and Rue blinks in surprise. “Then you all remember how to dance, I suppose. Come on, then—” and she raises her chin, uncrosses her wrists. Extends her hands, palms facing up, like an offering. “Dance with me, all of you, as we danced before. As we ought to have been dancing, all this time.”

Rue looks at Ahiru standing before her, and she sees the way Ahiru had looked at her on that day of the Fire Festival, and the way she had looked at her from the window on the rooftop with her hair flying wild in the flurry of crows around them, and the way she is looking at her now—for they are all one and the same. She looks at Rue like she deserves to be saved—but more than that, like she believes in it enough to make it true. And something about it is almost enough to make Rue believe in it, too, every time. Enough to make her wait all night in hopes for a dance with a prince, and in the wasteland of a raven’s heart in hopes for a way out of her story. Enough to reach out, now, and take hold of Ahiru’s hand. 

Ahiru beams up at her, like she knows all this, too, and she leans in close, to whisper—as though to tell a secret— “I heard you.”

“What?” Rue says, taken aback.

“I heard you,” Ahiru says, laughing. “I heard your love letter, on the wind—”

“It wasn’t a _love letter,_ ” Rue snaps, embarrassed. She can feel her face turning red. Ahiru, though, just grins ear to ear, tightening her grip on Rue’s hand, as though there’s any possibility Rue can still let go at this point, and she twirls around, leads Rue over to Fakir, who is staring at them both, amazed.

“Come on, Fakir,” Ahiru says, holding out her other hand. Fakir hesitates, but then he catches Rue’s eye. Rue, who holds his gaze steady. _Remember, you understood,_ she thinks, and wills the thought hard enough that he might hear it. 

Fakir swallows. He takes Ahiru’s hand. They stand there together, Ahiru between them, and it is almost a circle. But not quite.

“Mytho,” Ahiru says, and he comes, completing them. The wind settles, like a sigh; the lake ripples at their feet without a sound. The silver trees bow their heads as the four of them begin to dance.

Rue has not danced in a long time, and after these days in the forest her limbs are aching, her legs shaking. But her body remembers discipline like an old friend, straightening out her spine and marking her steps with intent, with precision. Fakir, too, wavers in his movements, and Rue suspects that he hasn’t been polishing up on his dancing, either, all this time cooped up in a room trying to rewrite an ending to their story and forgetting to live it instead. It’s Mytho who’s still retained the most elegance, not a toe or a wrist out of line; Ahiru is miles away from his steady grace, but she twirls and leaps and laughs through it all. It’s beautiful, if unorthodox, and Rue thinks that this is what she has forgotten: to dance not because she knows nothing else, but because she chooses to, out of love, out of happiness. For that has to be what she is feeling now—her heart light enough to burst, to spread wings and fly, tugging the corners of her mouth up into an impossible grin—surely this is what it feels like, to be happy—

“Ahiru,” Mytho says after a while; Rue has no way of knowing how much time has passed, besides the strain she feels in her bones. He sounds like something has just occurred to him, something he had forgotten. “What were you looking at, over the waters?”

“Oh, it was just a dream,” Ahiru says. “It was only just a dream.”

“I can’t believe you were out here all this time,” Fakir says, half to himself. The look of slight astonishment that has been stuck to his face the whole time is now beginning to wear off, replaced by the beginnings of his familiar scowl. Rue thinks it’s rather rich—and quite late—for him to try and preserve his delusions of detachment at this point, but then again, it’s Fakir. What else would one expect from him? At any rate, he still can’t take his eyes off Ahiru, so it softens the image quite a bit. “All alone.” He shakes his head, disbelieving. 

“I wasn’t alone,” says Ahiru. “I was never alone. There were so many people, guiding me along the way…” She trails off, then, suddenly coming to an abrupt stop, eyes wide, and Rue stumbles a little. “I almost forgot!”

“What is it, Ahiru?” Mytho asks.

“Can’t you hear it?” Ahiru says, whipping her head around to stare off into the distance, somewhere into the trees. “The sound that I was following, all this time. It’s so close, now.”

One by one, their heads turn to the trees as though answering the beck of a call. And Rue, too, can hear it now. In the heart of the forest, past the lake, steady as the thump of her heart—the faint beating of drums.

 

When they find Uzura sitting in a clearing amidst the trees she is still beating her drum, on and on, without any sign of stopping. Only when Ahiru gets to her knees before her, places a hand on her shoulder, and says her name, gently, does she lower her drumsticks and rub at her eyes, as though waking up from a long and heavy sleep.

“There you are,” she says. “I’ve been waiting for you for a very long time-zura.”

“What’s this?” Rue says, and Ahiru starts, because it hadn't occurred to her that she hasn’t ever met Uzura. Neither has Mytho, she realizes.

“It’s Uzura,” Fakir says. “She was made from Edel’s pieces, after she saved us, that night, from Kraehe.” 

Rue flinches, but before Ahiru can say anything, Uzura is getting to her feet and pointing a tiny drumstick up at her. “Princess-zura,” she says, waving the drumstick.

“That’s right,” Rue says. Her face softens a little. “I was the princess. For a little while, at least.” 

Ahiru frowns. “Aren’t you still a princess?” she says, but Uzura’s already moved on, shouldering her way past to jab her drumstick at Mytho.

“Prince-zura?” she says.

Mytho looks amused. “Depends on who’s telling the story,” he says.

Fakir rolls his eyes. “What a time to start getting philosophical,” he says.

Uzura zeroes in on Fakir, then, and runs straight into his legs, startling him. Ahiru laughs.

“Look, she missed you,” Ahiru says. 

Fakir scowls furiously. “She’s a puppet,” he says. “She doesn’t miss people.” 

Uzura blinks up at them. “You were missing,” she agrees. She points her drumstick at Ahiru, and then at Fakir, and Rue, and Mytho, in turn. “You were all missing.” She taps a little beat on her drum, shakes her head. “But not anymore.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Fakir says, with that expression on his face that makes him look like he’s battling a bad stomach ache. Oh, how Ahiru’s missed that look. 

“Shh,” she says, placing a hand on his wrist to quiet him. Fakir rears back, startled, but she keeps her hand there, and saves a little quiet smile for herself. “Uzura-san, how are you here?”

Uzura keeps drumming. “I walked-zura.”

“Fair enough,” Ahiru agrees. “How about— _why_ are you here? Where’s Drosselmeyer?”

Fakir tenses at the name, and Ahiru pats him a little, as though to remind him that that part of the story is over, that that story’s over, that there is no writer or pen or hand of fate to fear, not anymore. 

“Gone,” Uzura says. 

“Gone where?” Mytho says. His eyes are clouded with worry, and Ahiru knows what he’s thinking—that Drosselmeyer’s found some new story to write, new people to mold into characters and puppets of his own.

“Just gone-zura,” Uzura says. Another tap on her drum, to illustrate her point. “Where ghosts go when they don’t have anywhere to haunt-zura.”

They all share a look at that, Ahiru barely unable to control the feeling that flutters its wings in her chest, at her throat. Something like hope. “He’s dead?” she says.

“He was always dead,” says Mytho, looking thoughtful. “But he was kept alive by his story. Maybe… Maybe a writer dies when no one remembers his story.”

“Or when a story stops being a story,” Rue says. Her eyes are dark. She looks up, and meets Ahiru’s eyes, and does not look away.

“No story,” Uzura agrees. “So I came back-zura.”

“Me, too,” Rue says, so softly Ahiru almost misses it.

“So does that mean because Drosselmeyer’s gone, I got turned into a girl again?” Ahiru says. “Even though I wasn’t one to begin with?”

“I think,” Fakir says. He hesitates. “I think after he was gone he didn’t dictate what the story said, anymore. So I was free to write you into a girl, even though you didn’t have a say in the matter. Even if you didn’t want to be one.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a girl,” Ahiru says, wrinkling her nose at him. “Though it wasn’t bad being a duck, either. I don’t mind, though—this way, I can dance.” She twirls a little. “And besides, it’s a good thing you did, because it brought all of you here, didn’t it?” She laughs.

Fakir mutters something under his breath that she doesn’t quite catch.

“What?”

“I said,” he says, looking chagrined, “ _you_ brought all of us here, not me.” 

Ahiru sighs, shakes her head. “You all brought yourselves here,” she says. 

Uzura bangs her drum, loud, as though not to be forgotten. “ _Uzura_ brought you all here,” she corrects them, and Ahiru laughs.

“But now that we _are_ all here,” says Mytho, “the question is where we go from here.”

They all fall silent. Ahiru looks at them—Mytho with his snowy white hair fallen over his eyes; Rue with fists unclenched at last, a smile unfurling like the wings of a bird stretching for flight; Fakir, half in and half out of the shadows, the skin of his wrist soft under her palm. Uzura at their feet, still banging the rhythm to the tuneless song that had led them all back together. If this were a story, Ahiru thinks, she would say, _We go home,_ and they would walk off into the forest, back in the direction they’d come, and the sun would set over the treetops and the stars would align overhead to lead their way. And it would be another ending, in itself. 

That’s the trap of the story, Ahiru thinks now. The story that comes up to you with its arms outstretched, ready to bear upon you the weight, the terrible emptiness of an ending—and to fall into its embrace would be easy, would seem like the right thing to do, but she knows now that it is only when the lid closes that you realize you have been falling all along into your grave—

Ahiru looks at them all again and realizes what it is that has always been the enemy of the story, the fates of the future so written that they may as well be the past: possibility, rising up all around them like the match-lit blue of the dusk, the glow of the setting sun. A fire that puts itself to sleep, only to blaze back into the light of the following day, heralding not the inevitability of the morning but the wonder of all the possibilities it brings. Surely this is what magic is, Ahiru thinks; not being made into a girl, or a princess, or a duck, or any of those things, but instead, to simply be alive. To be free.

“I don’t know,” Ahiru says, and something lodged in her chest loosens, flies free. She laughs, then, and lets herself tip backwards onto the grass, until she’s sprawled out on the ground blinking up at all of them staring back at her in confusion. “I’m a little tired, though. I think I’m ready for sleep.”

“What?” says Fakir, so Ahiru tugs at his wrist until he lets himself fall next to her with a soft thud against the earth. Mytho and Rue look at each other, and then they, too, are joining them on the ground, until all of them are lying next to each other on the grass, looking up at the sky in silence.

Uzura bangs her drum. “What’s sleep-zura?” she wants to know.

Ahiru hums slightly, feels the weariness in her bones sink into something softer, settling. The slow, warm haze of drowsiness weighing down on her eyelids. “It’s when you rest,” she says. “When you close your eyes and dream at the end of the day, so you can be ready for the next one. And everything it might bring.”

“What’s dream-zura?”

“Something that isn’t real,” says Fakir, his voice close beside her, familiar. Ahiru closes her eyes. “Even if it feels like it is. Because dreams end when you wake up—that’s how you know it isn’t real.”

“Like a story,” says Rue, from Ahiru’s other side. “Stories are like that, too.” A pause. “What’s this—Who’s holding my hand?”

“Hmmm,” says Ahiru, stretching her mouth into a yawn. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

“So annoying,” Rue says, but she doesn’t take her hand away.

“What’s annoying-zura?” Another bang of the drum.

“It’s what you are, right now,” Fakir says. “Can’t you tell some people are trying to sleep?”

“There’s no need to be so harsh,” Mytho says, voice drifting up from somewhere in the darkness. “She’s only a child.”

“She’s not a child!” Fakir insists. “She’s a doll!”

“Like we used to be?” Mytho says innocently. “Hey—I'm kidding, I’m kidding, calm down, Fakir. Go to sleep.”

A rustle of grass. Ahiru can feel Fakir slowly lie back down from where he’d sat bolt upright at Mytho’s words. “It’s not a particularly funny joke,” Fakir mutters. Somewhere beside him, Uzura starts tapping on her drum again.

“I don’t know about that,” Rue says, laughter colouring her voice. “Your expression looked pretty funny to me.”

“Shut up,” says Fakir, and then he says something else, a little softer, but Ahiru doesn’t quite catch it. She’s tilting over the edge of sleep, surrounded, safe. A smile still curling at the ends of her lips. When she falls asleep it is to the gentle murmur of their conversation, to the slow and steady beat of the drum. The hush of the silver moon hanging heavy in the sky.

She dreams of morning.

**Author's Note:**

> i blasted through the first 6k of this within a week of marathoning this show in one day, simply because i believed in this so much. but in my mind there are two possible paths branching out of the ending of princess tutu. the first one is where rue and mytho are granted happiness in their storybook ending; of course, they deserve it, after all this time. after all this fight. ahiru and fakir, then, are granted glory, though ahiru finds it difficult to remember sometimes, splashing in the waters as a duck, and fakir has to be the one to write it and to retell it, to bear the burden of the story for both of them. 
> 
> the other path is this one. 
> 
> that being said, sometimes i remember the nature of ballet. the pristine beauty of its form. grace with pain. the way a ballerina’s feet look after dancing in toe shoes. sometimes i think—and know—the first ending to be true.
> 
> but then again, i do allow myself to believe, so thank you for reading this.


End file.
